From a Fellow Traveler
“Let me know what we can do for you.” When you have cancer, you hear that a lot. You hear it from coworkers and family members, from neighbors and friends. People want to do something; they want to help, but they don’t know how. So they try their best to offer some kind of support: “Let me know what we can do for you.”
But there isn’t much comfort in that phrase. What I want done for me (or my wife) is for the cancer to be taken away. So you are nice to ask, but you just can’t do for me what I need; thanks anyway.
OK; that’s a little harsh. (One of the side effects of chemo.) If I take a step back, I can see that people have done some really wonderful things for us: the Hope Lodge provided shelter close to my wife’s treatment, friends and family brought us food and gifts. I do appreciate the things people have done for us on this cancer journey.
But in the darkest and hardest parts, it wasn’t what people did for us that kept us going. It was people taking time to be with us that made the difference.
“Being with” is hard. “Being with” means investing in relationship. “Being with” means sharing pain and grief.
Like the friends who sat on the phone “with” me while I cried, so worried that I might lose my wife.
Like family members who stayed “with” our kids for over a month, allowing their own lives to be rearranged so our daughters could stay in their own house and sleep in their own beds while mom and dad were away.
Like the friends who sent us text messages every week, asking how treatment was going, showing their love and support, “with” us even across the miles.
Like the friends who made the journey to Cleveland to sit alongside us, and laugh with us, and cry with us, and just be “with” us in that moment.
The doing for was certainly appreciated; but the being with made the difference. Maybe we could tweak the phrase. “Let me know what we can do for you” is nice. But “Let me know how we can be with you” has the power to change the world.
Back in November, a friend sent me a link to an online Christmas sermon titled, “The Most Important Word.” The sermon was originally preached by Rev. Dr. Samuel Wells on Christmas Eve back in 2010 at Duke University. (You can read it from their chapel archives here or watch it preached here.) Watching that sermon got me thinking about the difference between doing for and being with.
In the sermon, the preacher points to how, at Christmas, God prioritizes being “with” us, and not just doing something “for” us. We don’t see God making things perfect “for” us at Christmas; we see Jesus coming down to be “with” us. That insight really struck home for me.
At the beginning of this cancer journey, all I wanted from God was what God could do “for” me. All my prayers were focused on God just fixing the problem and making the cancer go away. I wanted to give God my Christmas wish list, and then to have it just happen, like presents showing up under a tree, mysteriously delivered by Santa.
That Christmas sermon helped shape my prayers in a slightly different direction. Don’t get me wrong: I often pray for a miracle, still. I pray that, when we go for the next scans, this tumor will miraculously be gone; that God will use the amazing doctors and medical technology that exists to do that “for” us.
But now, my prayers also rejoice that God is “with” us in the struggle. And I ask God to continue to be “with” us. I wasn’t praying like that when we started this journey.
As with everything in our life right now, Christmas this year is framed by my wife’s cancer. We are in a good place at the moment. She has completed chemoradiation at the Cleveland Clinic and we are back home again. She is healing now, and we have a break from treatment until the middle of January. It feels amazing to be back in our own beds, to be with our kids, and to live in a world where we have a deeper understanding of how much people love and care for us.
This year, I see a little more clearly how much I need God to be “with” me and my family. We need other people who are “with” us on the journey, as well. We need them to be “with” us so that we can, in the words of my favorite Christmas song, “muddle through somehow.”
That lyric comes from the original version of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” Originally recorded by Judy Garland for the movie Meet Me in St. Louis in 1944, the song went through a series of revisions in its life, often because a performer or producer felt it was too depressing.
In 1957, ol’ Blue Eyes wanted to record the song for his upcoming Christmas album, A Jolly Christmas from Frank Sinatra. But the original version wasn’t quite jolly enough… so they made some adjustments. One change: “Until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow” became “hang a shining star upon the highest bough.” Hanging shining stars, and muddling through; quite the difference!
“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” has been on my mind since that Christmas sermon made me think of it. Throughout Advent, that song has served as a constant reminder to me of the difference between what God has done for us and what God has done to be with us.
Now that my wife’s first phase of treatment is completed, we definitely have some reasons to be hanging shining stars on the highest boughs; but we also had a lot of time this year just muddling through. And in the midst of all that muddling, God never stopped being with us.
And really, isn’t being with what Christmas is all about? God didn’t see a world lost in sin and say, “Let me know what I can do for you.” Instead, the prophet announces the answer to the question, “Let me know how I can be with you.” And that answer is Emmanuel, God with us.
I am thankful for what God has done for us in Jesus, eternally thankful! And the point of all the doing for is an eternal being with.
This Christmas, I know our friends are “with” us. I know our family is “with” us. I know our God is “with” us. And I feel that comfort now: even on the hard days; even when we are just trying to muddle through somehow.